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Wed, 13 Dec 2017 18:43:54 -0800Joomla! - Open Source Content Managementen-gbJung's "earthiness"http://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/jung-s-earthiness.html
http://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/jung-s-earthiness.htmlIn the previous two posts, I set out to show how Jung’s archetypal psychology might be of interest to polytheists and deity-centered Pagans. In concluding, I promised to discuss how Jung may also be of interest to earth-centered Pagans.

Jung’s earthiness is sometimes easy to miss. It is quite possible to read a great deal of Jung’s writings, as well as a lot of secondary literature on Jungian psychology, and not find much concern at all with the natural world. In fact, it is easy to interpret Jungian philosophy as being introverted to the point of solipsism. And yet, one of Jung’s biographers confidentially calls him “earth-rooted” as well as “spiritually centered”. People who knew him called often described him as “earthy”, referring to his physicality and vitality, as well as his simplicity. Olga Konig-Fachsenfeld, for one, wrote that Jung's "earth-rootedness" was for her "the guarantee for the credibility of his psychology".

In his personal life, Jung had an intense love of nature, simple rustic lifestyle, and solitude, reminiscent of the Transcendentalists. Jung writes in his semi-autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections that part of him always felt “remote from the world of men, but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the weather, all living creatures.” His experience of nature bordered on the pantheistic:

“Nothing could persuade me that ‘in the image of God’ applied only to man. In fact it seemed to me that the high mountains, the rivers, lakes, trees, flowers, and animals far better exemplified the essence of God than men with their ridiculous clothes, their meanness, vanity, mendacity, and abhorrent egotism [...]

Jung called plants "God's thoughts" and had a particular appreciation for trees:

“Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.”

Not surprisingly, Jung associated the natural world with his mother, who seemingly in spite of her Christian faith “was somehow rooted in deep, invisible ground [...] somehow connected with animals, trees, mountains, meadows, and running water [...].” These associations gave Jung “a sense of security and the conviction that here was solid ground on which one could stand.” He states, “It never occurred to me how ‘pagan’ this foundation was.”

Interestingly, Jung's earthiness struggled with other parts of himself that were less connected to the natural world. He wrote that the journey from the "cloud cuckoo land" of his youth to "reality" took a long time. He explains that his own personal Pilgrim's Progress "consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am."

In his later years, Jung came to associate the feeling of earth-connection with one place in particular: the “Tower” at Bolingen, a second home which Jung helped to craft from stone with his own hands.

“The feeling of repose and renewal that I had in this tower was intense from the start. It represented for me the maternal hearth. [...] From the beginning I felt the Tower as in some way a place of maturation a maternal womb or a maternal figure in which I could become what I was, what I am and will be. It gave me a feeling as if I were being reborn in stone. It is thus a concretization of the individuation process, a memorial aere perennius. During the building work, of course, I never considered these matters. I built the house in sections, always following the concrete needs of the moment. It might also be said that I built, it in a kind of dream. Only afterward did I see how all the parts fitted together and that a meaningful form had resulted: a symbol of psychic wholeness.”

Regarding the time he spent at Bolingen, Jung wrote:

“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland.”

This last quotations reveals a sense of the deep connection that Jung experienced between his “internal” psyche and the “external” natural world, something we will explore in the next post.

Jung was deeply concerned with the loss of the sense of mystical participation in nature in modern humankind, a loss that he laid squarely at the feet of Christianity. This loss of connection was, Jung believed, a source of neurosis which was absent in more "primitive" cultures. According to Jung, the split between humankind and nature was related to the division between the ego and unconscious within the human psyche.

In my next post, I will describe how Jung’s ideas might be understood from an earth-centered perspective, and how his ideas are being developed my an emerging field called “ecopsychology”.

Read more]]>allergicpagan@gmail.com (John Halstead)Paths BlogsSat, 16 Feb 2013 14:16:32 -0800Polytheistic experience and Jung’s experience of the archetypeshttp://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/polytheistic-experience-and-jung-s-experience-of-the-archetypes.html
http://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/polytheistic-experience-and-jung-s-experience-of-the-archetypes.htmlLast time, I talked about how Jungian archetypes, far from being mere metaphors for natural and psychological processes, can accurately be described as "gods". In this post, I want to discuss how the experience of Jung's archetypes closely resembles Polytheists' descriptions of their encounter with the gods.

But is Jung’s theory of the archetypes really inconsistent with the experience Polytheists? Is it possible that the archetypes have been misunderstood by many Polytheists and Pagans alike?

Jung in dialogue with the archetypes

The way that many Pagans have applied Jung’s theories does admittedly render a divinity which is psychologized and abstract. But Jung’s own description of the experience of the archetypes was very different. Jung engaged his unconscious through a technique called “active imagination”, which he also taught to his patients. Active imagination involves inducing a kind of trace or “twilight consciousness”, of the type which we experience just before falling asleep -- a waking dream, if you will. Then Jung would attempt to consciously interact with the images that emerged.

In his semi-autobiographical, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung writes about how he would dialogue with archetypal images, like his "anima", a muse-like mediating archetype. The fact that Jung would talk to the archetypal images of his unconscious, by itself, is not all the surprising; but the fact that the images responded to him -- actually talked back to him -- is surprising. (Jung admitted that he sometimes feared for his sanity.)

The significance of Jung’s experience for Polytheists becomes clear when Jung describes his interaction with another archetypal figure, Philemon, a figure from Greek myth who functioned as a psychopomp (soul guide) for Jung. Philemon was an image of Jung’s "Wise Old Man" or Senex archetype. Jung writes about Philemon as something (or someone) which was simultaneously a part of him and yet acted independently of him; Philemon knew things Jung did not know, and said things that Jung did not think:

“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. [...] I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me. [...] Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality.”

Here, Jung’s description of his interaction with Philemon resembles closely the language used by many Polytheists to describe their own encounters with the gods, which may also be described as encounters with "living personalities". To anyone who only knows of the archetypal through the writings of Pagan authors, Jung's description of the archetypes should be surprising. Jung's archetypes are clearly not mere psychologized versions of the gods.

It is also noteworthy that Jung was not interacting with the Old Man archetype itself, but a specific and very personal image of the archetype, Philemon. The archetypes are ineffable -- and are, in that sense, abstract. But while the archetypes cannot be experienced directly, they can be experienced through “archetypal images”, of which Philemon is one example. The many pagan and Neopagan deities may be seen as other examples of archetypal images, which point beyond themselves to the unknowable archetypes or gods.

The archetypes as “other”

Many Polytheists balk at archetypal explanations of the gods, because they experience the gods as separate beings, not as creations of their own minds. But Jung experienced the archetypal image of Philemon, not as some mere metaphor, but as “a living personality”, something which was in him, but yet, not him. This “otherness” is an essential quality of the archetypes for Jung. Jung called this quality “numinosity”, a term he borrowed from Rudolph Otto. According to Jung, the numinous is

“a dynamical agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will. On the contrary, it seizes and controls the human subject, who is always rather its victim than its creator. The numinosum -- whatever its cause may be -- is an experience of the subject independent of his will. At all events, religious teaching as well as the consensus genitum always and everywhere explain this experience as being due to a cause external to the individual. The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness.”

“An invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness”: what could be a better description of the experiences of many Polytheists? Elsewhere, Jung described the power of the archetypes to fascinate, overcome, and even possess us. He speaks of another “will” operating within him, of the experience of “spontaneous agencies”, and of “elements in ourselves which are strange to us”.

The archetypes are not creations of our conscious minds. They are "agencies" at work within us, yet separate from what we commonly think of as "us": they are an otherness within our own subjectivity. This description is consistent with Polytheistic experience of the gods as "persons". This experience of otherness can manifest in subtle ways, such as artistic inspiration, as well as in less subtle ways, such as divine revelation, schizophrenia, or even so-called “spirit possession”.

While the empiricist in Jung preferred the term “archetypes”, he explained that “god” and “daimon” are better terms, because they convey the numinosity, or the otherness, of the archetypal experience better:

“[Humankind] cannot grasp, comprehend, dominate them; nor can he free himself or escape from them, and therefore feels them as overpowering. Recognizing that they do not spring from his conscious personality, he calls them mana, daimon, or God. [...] Therefore the validity of such terms as mana, daimon, or God can be neither disproved nor affirmed. We can, however, establish that the sense of strangeness connected with the experience of something objective, apparently outside the psyche, is indeed authentic.

“We know that something unknown, alien, does come our way, just as we know that we do not ourselves make a dream or an inspiration, but that it somehow arises of its own accord. What does happen to us in this manner can be said to emanate from mana, from a daimon, a god, or the unconscious. The first three terms have the great merit of including and evoking the emotional quality of numinosity, whereas the latter the unconscious is banal and therefore closer to reality. [...] The unconscious is too neutral and rational a term to give much impetus to the imagination. [...]

“The great advantage of the concepts ‘daimon’ and ‘God lies in making possible a much better objectification of the vis-a-vis, namely, a personification of it. Their emotional quality confers life and effectuality upon them.”

Thus, Jung validates the Polytheistic experience of the gods as something "objective", seemingly "outside" of one's self, even while he locates the gods in the psyche. He can do this because, for Jung's, the psyche is much "bigger" than what we ordinarily think of as our "self".

The role of the conscious mind

The gods, for Jung, are "other", because they arise out of the unconscious, which we experience as other than our waking consciousness. It is the source of our dreams, creative inspiration, and the "still small voice" that we sometimes hear. And yet, Jung insisted that the consciousness had a critical role to play in interacting with the archetypal gods. Without ordering effect of consciousness, the gods, according to Jung, become “diseases”: neurosis and psychosis. He explains:

“The essential thing is to differentiate oneself from these unconscious contents by personifying them, and at the same time to bring them into relationship with consciousness. That is the technique for stripping them of their [destructive] power. It is not too difficult to personify them, as they always possess a certain degree of autonomy, and separate identity of their own. Their autonomy is a most uncomfortable thing to reconcile oneself to, and yet the very fact that the unconscious presents itself in that way gives us the best means of handling it. …

“I took great care to try to understand every single image, every item of my psychic inventory, … and, above all, to realize them in actual life. That is what we usually neglect to do. We allow the images to rise up, and maybe we wonder about them, but that is all. We do not take the trouble to understand them, let alone draw ethical conclusions from them. This stopping-short conjures up the negative effects of the unconscious.”

Jung explains that, by personifying the archetypal images, we differentiate our conscious selves from them. This dis-identification is actually the first step to consciously re-integrating them into our lives in a healthy fashion -- which is what Jung alludes to when he talks about drawing "ethical conclusions" from archetypal experience. Failing to take this step, says Jung, "deprives us of our wholeness".

Jung speaks about “personification” of the archetypes, but this should not mislead us into think that we are "playing pretend" when we interact with the archetypal gods. For Jung, the archetypes are as "real" as any other human experience, and their power can be a blessing or a curse to us:

“Although everything is experienced in image form, i.e., symbolically, it is by no means a question of fictitious dangers but of very real risks upon which the fate of a whole life may depend. The chief danger is that of succumbing to the fascinating influence of the archetypes, and this is most likely to happen when the archetypal images are not made conscious. If there is already a predisposition to psychosis, it may even happen that the archetypal figures, which are endowed with a certain autonomy anyway on account of their natural numinosity, will escape from conscious control altogether and become completely independent, thus producing the phenomena of possession.”

Jung’s last comment raises some interesting questions about the Polytheistic and Pagan practices of possession, aspecting, “invocation” or “calling down” the gods. Is it possible that not all encounters with the deities are healthy? Is "bringing back the gods" a valid end in itself or just one step in a larger process of Self-realization? These are questions I will explore in a future post.

In this post and the previous one, I talked about Jungian archetypes in relation to Polytheists' experience of the gods. Next time, I will explore some of what Jung had to say which may be of interest to earth-centered Pagans.

*Note: Here, I am distinguishing "Polytheists", who espouse a "hard" polytheism and whose practice may be characterized as deity-centered, from "Pagans", who tend to espouse "softer" versions of polytheism and whose practice may be more earth-centered or Self-centric.

Part of the reason for the antipathy of many Polytheists for Paganism is the perception that for Pagans the gods are personifications of natural forces or Jungian archetypes, whereas for Polytheists the gods are, in Lupus’ words, “actual beings with independence, volition, and power”. Polytheistic practice, according to Lupus, “presupposes a definite being with volition and consciousness on the other end of the interaction.” In contrast, Jungian archetypes are often understood by Pagans as mere metaphors of of natural or psychological processes. A Polytheist who understands the archetypes in this way might well wonder why would anyone worship the creations of their own mind.

In the 1960s and 70s, Pagans seized onto Jung’s conception of archetypes as a way of legitimizing Pagan polytheism in the face of the crumbling claims to historical authenticity. In the process though, the gods of Paganism became psychologized, and they lost their numinous quality. (Numinosity refers, in part, to the mysterious “otherness” of an encounter with the divine.) The Pagan gods had become archetypes, but Pagans had lost the sense of the archetypes as gods. In reaction, many Polytheists in search of communion with numinous Others rejected Jungian Paganism in favor of a radical (or “hard”) polytheism which treats the gods as beings existing independent of the human psyche.

I believe that this rejection of Jungian archetypes is the result of a misunderstanding by many Pagans of Jung’s concept of archetypes. Jung would say that, while the gods may be a part of us, we must remember that they are also other than us, if by “us” we mean our conscious mind or ego-self. Thus, Jung could say that “the world of gods and spirits is truly ‘nothing but’ the collective unconscious inside me”, and in the same breath say that “the collective unconscious is the world of gods and spirits outside me”. This is why Jung called the archetypes “gods” and compared the psyche to an “Olympus full of deities who want to be propitiated, served, feared and worshipped”. He wrote that moderns congratulate ourselves

"imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. [...] Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus."

The gods are not gone; they have just come home -- to the psyche.

This was not mere metaphor. Jung wrote this religious language offers the only “adequate” vocabulary to describe the experience of being faced with the power of the archetypes. He explained that we experience the archetypes as gods because they are beyond our conscious control. They have the power to transform our lives in the way that we would expect of gods, the power to, in the words of Gilbert Murray, “bring man bliss or tear his life to shreds”. These powers, says Jung, surely deserve to be called gods as they compel “the same belief or fear, submission or devotion which a god would demand from [humankind].”

While the Jungian gods are part of the human psyche, it should be remembered that the Greek term psyche is better translated as “soul” than as “mind”. Too often, in discussions of the psychological nature of Pagan gods, the modifier “just” is inserted immediately preceding the word “psychological”, as in, “The Pagan gods are just psychological”, as if to say they are mere figments of one’s imagination that one can create at will. This a profound misunderstanding of Jung’s theory of the psyche. Jung said that ultimately “it does not matter whether the gods are ‘inside’ or ‘outside’.” This is because the psyche is far more mysterious and more capacious than our conscious mind can imagine. Jung wrote that “the psyche is the mother and the maker, the subject and even the possibility of consciousness itself. It reaches so far beyond the boundaries of consciousness that the latter could easily be compared to an island in the ocean.”

The de-godding of the archetypes by Pagans resulted largely from a confusion of symbolwith archetype. According to Jung, symbols refer to, but are not identical with, the archetypes located deep in the unconscious. The unconscious transcends the ego in the same way the gods transcend mortals. While symbols have a conscious and known meaning, the archetypes remains unknown and inexhaustible. Symbols can only ever be partial expressions of the archetypes. The moment an archetype is fully comprehended by the conscious mind is the moment is ceases to be an archetype. The claim that any symbol could fully comprehend the meaning of an archetype would be a kind of psychic idolatry.

In addition, archetypes cannot be created consciously. The archetypes arise from the unconscious, not the conscious mind. Jung writes, “Psychologically speaking, the domain of ‘gods’ begins where consciousness leaves off.” This is why the gods visit us in our dreams, our imagination, and in our art. The notion that one could consciously create archetypes would have been as foreign to Jung as the so-called “plug-and-play” gods of some Pagans are to Polytheists. Archetypes can no more be created than our dreams can be created. The archetypes, like dreams, are something that happens to us, not something we cause to happen.

Friedrich Schiller famously called the disenchantment of nature die Entgotterung der Natur, the “de-godding of nature.” The Pagan project of re-enchanting the world, then, might well be called the "re-godding" of nature. If they are understood as mere metaphors, Jungian archetypes lack the numinosity that would qualify for a true “return of the gods”. But the revitalized understanding of the archetypes that I have outlined above might serve as a bridge between Polytheists and Pagans, even as many of them now try to distance themselves from each other. In my next post, I will show how Jung’s description of the experience of the archetypes closely resembles the Polytheistic description of encounter with the gods, and how Jung's archetypes might satisfy Lupus’ call for the return of gods with “independence, volition, and power”.

Read more]]>allergicpagan@gmail.com (John Halstead)Paths BlogsTue, 15 Jan 2013 05:46:44 -0800Jung's Pagans, pt. 3: Janet and Stewart Farrar and Vivianne Crowleyhttp://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/jung-s-pagans-pt-3-janet-and-stewart-farrar-and-vivianne-crowley.html
http://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/jung-s-pagans-pt-3-janet-and-stewart-farrar-and-vivianne-crowley.htmlCarl Jung articulated a psychology in which myth emerges from biology, part of a natural process of individuation. This 3-part guest post series by John Halstead explores the influence of Jung on major figures in Contemporary Paganism.

by John Halstead

Janet and Stewart Farrar

Janet and Stewart Farrar were initiates of Alex Sanders into Alexandrian Witchcraft and were strongly influenced by Doreen Valiente, and who was herself influenced by Jungian ideas.

Witchcraft and psychology

In The Witches’ Way (1984), the Farrars devoted a chapter to the Jungian interpretation of Wiccan ritual. They write that “Every witch would be well advised to study the works of Carl Gustav Jung. [...] Jung’s ideas strike an immediate chord with almost every witch who turns serious attention to them.”

In The Witches’ Goddess, the Farrars write that “[e]very good witch, and particularly every good High Priestess, has to be something of a psychologist.” They then proceed to explain such Jungian concepts as the collective unconscious, the archetypes, the anima and animus, and synchronicity.

Integrating the psyche

In The Witches’ Way, the Farrars go on to define the purpose of Wicca “as a religion” (as opposed to “a Craft”) to be the integration of conflicting aspects of the individual psyche and the individual psyche with the "Cosmic Psyche". They compare ritual to dreams, as both involve communication between the unconscious and the ego:

“In dreams, the necessary communication between Unconscious and Ego is initiated by the Unconscious. In ritual, it is initiated by the Ego.”

Gods and archetypes

The Farrars went on to publish The Witches’ Goddess (1987) and The Witches’ God (1989), which describe various feminine and masculine “archetypal” principles such as the “Earth Mother”, the “Bright and Dark Mother”, and the “Triple Goddess” (all of which they defined as “aspects” of Jung’s “Great Mother” archetype), and the “Son/Lover”, the “Vegetation God”, and the “Horned God”.

While the Farrars insist the archetypes are “real” and the gods “exist”, they nevertheless take a pragmatic or psychological attitude to the question which should be of interest to many naturalistic Pagans:

“To the age-old question, ‘Are the Gods real?’ … the witch answers confidently, ‘Yes.’ [...] But from the point of view of the psychic value of myth, ritual and symbolism, the somewhat surprising answer to the question is, ‘It doesn’t matter’. Each man and woman can worry out for himself or herself whether archetypal God-forms were born in the human Collective Unconscious or took up residence there (and elsewhere) as pied-a-terre from their cosmic home—their importance to the human psyche is beyond doubt in either case, and the techniques for coming to healthy and fruitful terms with them can be used by believers and non-believers alike.

“Voltaire said: ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’. That remark can be taken as cynical; but it can also be rephrased: ‘Whether the archetypal God-forms are cosmically divine, or merely the living foundation-stones of the human psyche, we would be wise to seek intercourse with them as though they were divine’. Myth and ritual bring about nourishing communication with the Archetypes, and because of the nature and evolution of the human psyche, the symbolism or myth or ritual—their only effective vocabulary—is basically religious.”

Vivianne Crowley

Vivianne Crowley (no relation to Aleister Crowley) is herself a Jungian therapist, as well as an initiate of both Gardnerian and Alexandrian Witchcraft. Her influence on the British Neo-Pagan community has been significant.

Wouter Hanegraaf has written that Crowley’s Jungian perspective “is so strong that readers might be forgiven for concluding that Wicca is little more than a religious and ritual translation of Jungian psychology.”

Mysteries and psychotherapy

Crowley writes in her essay, “Wicca as a Modern-Day Mystery Religion” (included in Graham Harvey’s Paganism Today), that Wicca is a mystery religion which has the same goal as the ancient mysteries:

“to know thyself and to attain some form of permanent psycho-spiritual transformation involving a moving of the center of the personality from the ego (what I think of as myself), to the Self (what I truly am when the contents of the unconscious are revealed and reconciled). Interestingly, these aims are similar to those of many of the more spiritually-oriented psychotherapy movements, of which Carl Jung’s is the best-known.”

According to Crowley, Wicca accomplishes this psycho-spiritual transformation through religious ritual, which is an “externalization” of an inner psychological journey represented through symbolism.

Initiation and individuation

Crowley elaborates on this theme in her book Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Age. There she interprets the three degrees of the Wiccan initiation in Jungian terms.

According to Crowley, the first initiation is a confrontation with the Jungian shadow and a balancing of the four Jungian functions (sensation, thinking, intuition, feeling), which Crowley associates in typical Neo-Pagan fashion with the four cardinal directions and the four Empedoclean elements and then superimposes on a quartered circle.

Crowley (like the Farrars) described the second initiation as a confrontation with one’s anima/animus and an experience of ego-death, mythologized in the Gardnerian “Legend of the Goddess”.

The third initiation for Crowley was an encounter with the Jungian Self through the union of the conscious with the unconscious, symbolized by the Great Rite, the Sacred Marriage between the God and Goddess.

Thus, in Crowley’s view, the Wiccan initiations are steps in “a journey toward individuation -- the term which Carl Jung used to describe the process of becoming who and what we really are.”

Conclusion

David Waldon, and other writers like Naomi Goldenberg (Changing of the Gods) and David Tacey (Jung and the New Age), criticize the facile adoption of Jungian concepts by many Neo-Pagans. Nevertheless, all of these writers attest to the importance of Jung and his ideas to the movement.

Through Starhawk, Margot Adler, the Farrars, Vivianne Crowley, and other Pagan writers and teachers, the ideas of Jung thoroughly permeated contemporary Pagan thought.

From Romanticism to Jung

According to David Waldron, “The adoption of Jungian analytical psychology by much of the neo-Pagan movement during the sixties and seventies led to profound changes in the nature of neo-Pagan approaches to history, culture, and spirituality.” It led to a shift in emphasis from concerns with historical authenticity and adherence to tradition to a focus on “psychological truth” and “Pagan consciousness” (the experience of divinity as immanent). Waldron explains:

“In many this represent[ed] a return to the origins of neo-Paganism in the Theosophical Society and nineteenth century Romanticism as opposed to the ideas expressed in Gerald Gardner’s Wicca and the traditions of ritual secret societies and esoteric occultism that spawned the original movement.”

From Jung to post-modernism

Waldron writes that, in the 1990s and 21st century, Jungian theory began to be dislodged as the dominant explanatory theory of Neo-Paganism and was supplanted by what Waldron identifies as “post-modern theory”, which rejects all meta-narratives (like Jungianism) and all forms of epistemological foundationalism, privileging creativity and experience over all.

This postmodern suspicion of objective truth claims may be observed in contemporary Pagan polytheists’ comfort with unsystematic descriptions of their pluralistic experience of divinity.

For more on the influence of Jung on the Neo-Pagan movement, see:

Crowley, Vivianne. “Neo-Paganism and Psychology, in The Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism, eds. Shelley Rabinovich and James Lewis (2002).

Goldenberg, Naomi. Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the end of traditional religions (1979).

This series has explored Jung's influence on seven major figures, one by one. Check previous posts for essays on:

Read more]]>brandonmademedoit@gmail.com (B. T. Newberg)Paths BlogsThu, 13 Dec 2012 03:35:51 -0800Jung's Pagans, pt. 1: Dion Fortune and Israel Regardiehttp://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/jung-s-pagans-pt-1-dion-fortune-and-israel-regardie.html
http://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/jung-s-pagans-pt-1-dion-fortune-and-israel-regardie.htmlCarl Jung articulated a psychology in which myth emerges from biology, part of a natural process of individuation. This 3-part guest post series by John Halstead explores the influence of Jung on major figures in Contemporary Paganism.

by John Halstead

One source of theory for naturalistic Pagans is the writings of Carl Jung. Jung and several of his followers, like Erich Neumann and Joseph Campbell, were a major influence on the development of contemporary Paganism.

The Influence of Jung on Neo-Paganism

Jung’s influence can be found in the work of proto-Pagan esotericists like Dion Fortune and Israel Regardie; “goddess feminists” like Esther Harding and Jean Shinoda Bolen; and early Neo-Pagans like Doreen Valiente and Frederick Adams (the founder of Feraferia). All of these individuals had an important influence on the development of the contemporary Pagan movement, and through them the ideas of Jung permeated Neo-Pagan thought.

Popularization

In the 1960s and 1970s, Jungian psychology was popularized and embraced by the countercultural and New Age movements. At the same time, according to David Waldron, in The Sign of the Witch (2008), the Jungian theoretical model and Jungian language were adopted by Neo-Pagans to legitimize their beliefs and ritual practices.

Jungian interpretations of Paganism were popularized by writers like Starhawk, Margot Adler, and Janet and Stewart Farrar. By 1991, David Burnett could fairly claim, in his book Dawning of the Pagan Moon,"It is only by understanding Jungian psychology that the outsider will gain any appreciation of the rationale of the neopagan movement. Without it, the movement will appear a collection of exotic ideas and practices."

Dion Fortune

Dion Fortune (Violet Firth) was a well-known occultist of the early 20th century. She belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and founded her own occult order, the Society of Inner Light.

The influence of Fortune on Paganism has been documented by Ronald Hutton in Triumph of the Moon. Hutton describes her greatest single legacy to modern Pagan witchcraft to be her idea of magical polarity, the notion that erotic attraction between the sexes could be channeled into magical operations.

Fortune coined the phrase, “A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism”, and it was through Fortune’s influence that Doreen Valiente introduced a larger role for the Goddess (and hence the High Priestess) into Gardnerian witchcraft. Without Fortune’s influence, it is possible that the women’s spirituality movement of the 1970s would never have embraced Neo-Pagan witchcraft and witchcraft would have remained an obscure esoteric tradition.

Psychology

Fortune studied psychology and actually practiced as a psychoanalyst for a time. In the course of her studies, she was influenced most strongly by the writings of Freud and Jung, both of whom she writes about in her first publication in 1922, Machinery of the Mind. Fortune frequently uses the term “archetype” in her esoteric writings, and Jung is cited in both her nonfiction and her fiction. She is credited by Chas Clifton with being the first occult author to approach magic from a Jungian perspective.

Fortune believed that a “sound knowledge of the psychology of the subconscious mind” was necessary for the safe practice of occultism. She saw esotericism as an extension of psychology:

“We can define occultism as an extension of psychology, for it studies certain little-known aspects of the human mind and the mind side of Nature. Its findings, rightly formulated and understood, fit in with what is already established in psychology and natural science.” (Sane Occultism, 1929)

She even believed that “in the possibilities of ritual magic we shall find an invaluable therapeutic agent for use in certain forms of mental disease.”

The nature of esoteric practice

Fortune’s first major esoteric work, The Mystical Qabalah, was published in 1935. In it, she interpreted the esoteric practices as techniques of auto-suggestion for creating altered states of consciousness. She writes, “Viewed as a means of invoking the spirit of God, ceremonial is pure superstitution; but viewed as a means of evoking the spirit of man, it is pure psychology, and that is how I view it.”

The subject of the book is a psychological interpretation of the Qabalistic Tree of Life. Like Jung, Fortune believed that the human soul was “many-sided”, and for Fortune, the goal of esoteric work was to balance the forces of the subconscious under the dominion of the “Higher Self”. This is accomplished by taking advantage of the “symbolizing power of the subconscious mind”, which draws associations spontaneously between symbols.

According to Fortune, the Tree of Life is a microcosmic map of the human mind. In The Mystical Qabalah, She relates the gods and goddesses of the various pantheons to the various positions on the Tree. Like Jung, Fortune taught that the gods are personifications of the forces at work in the subconscious of the individual.

Meditation on the Tree is then used “to evoke images from the subconscious mind into conscious content” producing an “artificially produced waking dream”, similar to Jung’s practice of “active imagination”. The result is an integration of the subconscious forces into conscious control:

“The ceremony of initiation, and the teachings that should be given in the various grades, are simply designed to make conscious what was previously subconscious, and to bring under the control of the will, directed by the higher intelligence, those developed reaction-capacities which have hitherto only responded blindly to their appropriate stimuli.”

Fortune’s writing shows the influence of both Freud and Jung. In some places, she seems more Freudian, but like Jung, Fortune’s conception of the “subconscious” is not exclusively negative. Thus, the goal of ceremonial magic was not only to integrate destructive complexes, but also to awaken “latent capacities of our own higher selves.”

The nature of the gods

In answer to the question whether the gods are real, Fortune wrote that they are neither “real persons as we understand personality” nor illusions; they are rather “emanations of the group-minds of races” which are powerful because of their influence over the imaginations of their worshipers (this construction based on race, though deplorable today, was endemic to the historical period).

Fortune frequently used terms like the “racial mind”, “racial imagination”, and “racial subconscious”, by which she seemed to mean something like Jung’s “collective unconscious”. Fortune related esoteric work to dream association, except, “in the case of the Qabalah the dreamer is the racial subconscious.”

Polarity

Jungian concepts are also found in Fortune’s occult fiction, the theme of which is often the erotico-magical polarity of the male and female characters, a concept which became foundational for Wicca. Fortune’s novels The Sea Priestess (1938) and The Goat Foot God (1936) are clearly the inspiration behind the Neo-Pagan Goddess and Horned God.

Fortune’s most famous quotation for Pagans is “all the gods are one god, and all the goddesses are one goddess...”, which has become (rightly or wrongly) a kind of proof text for Jungian Paganism (Pagans often leave off the rest of the quotation: “[...] and there is one initiator”).

The quote comes from Fortune’s novel, The Sea Priestess (1938). There, she has one of her characters say: “... the old gods are coming back, and man is finding Aphrodite and Ares and great Zeus in his own heart, for that is the revelation of the aeon." Similarly, in her book, The Winged Bull (1935), Fortune’s character says: “God was many-sided, you couldn’t see every side at once; and the gods were the facets of the One. [...] God was as many-sided as the soul of man.”

Statements like these were to inspire several generations of Neo-Pagans to come.

Israel Regardie

Israel Regardie is probably best known for publishing the secret ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in his book The Golden Dawn (1937).

Ronald Hutton explains in his book, Drawing Down the Moon, how Gerald Gardner built his Neo-Pagan witchcraft cult on the framework of the Golden Dawn system.

If Dion Fortune deserves the credit for being the first author to explain esoteric practice in Jungian terms, Israel Regardie deserves the credit for making the connection much more explicit and for doing so in terms that are comprehensible to the non-occultist. While both Fortune and Regardie were influenced by both Freud and Jung, the influence of Jung on Regardie is stronger.

Magic and psychotherapy

Just three years after Fortune published her The Mystical Qabalah, Regardie published his The Middle Pillar (1938), which was subtitled, “a co-relation of the principles of analytical psychology and the elementary techniques of magic.” The book is now in its third edition, to which its editors have added a chapter on “Psychology and Magic” which further elaborates on Jung’s “spiritual psychology”.

In the introduction to the second edition of the book, Regardie wrote that

“The real virtue of the book lies in its correlation of the practice of magic to modern psychotherapy. For magic places the achievement of self-awareness second only in importance to the achievement of unity with God. And Jung’s definition of psychotherapy was that which enabled one to become conscious of what hitherto was unconscious.”

Regardie explained that the purpose of his book was to help others recognize that in the

“deep unconscious levels lies a great storehouse of power, awareness and vitality which must not only be awakened but recognized and equilibriated for the human being to function at maximum capacity.”

Regardie saw analytical psychology and magic as two halves of “a single system whose goal is the integration of the human personality,” the aim of which was “to unify the different departments and functions of [humankind’s] being, to bring into operation those which for various reasons were latent.”

Regardie even suggested that all magical aspirants should undergo psychoanalysis, something which Regardie himself did as he was writing The Middle Pillar. But where traditional analysis left off, Regardie saw magic picking up.

God and the collective unconscious

Regardie cites Jung and discusses his concepts of an individual and collective unconscious. For Regardie, God and the collective unconscious are interchangeable terms, depending only on the religious or metaphysical system one chooses.

As Regardie explains, the collective unconscious includes archetypes, which are psychic forms that have been molded by repeated ancestral experiences. These take the form of gods and angels in magical practice. Archetypal images then are “nodal points which act as termini or power stations through which, as it were, the root life stream [of the collective unconscious] flows.”

The Qabalah and the psyche

Like Fortune, Regardie’s work is an elaboration on the Quabalistic Tree of Life. Regardie superimposes’ Jung’s map of the psyche onto the Tree. In Regardie’s schema, the first three and “highest” sephirot correspond to Jung’s unconscious, with the second and third representing the animus and anima. The fourth through the eighth represent consciousness, with the “center” sephirot representing the ego. The last two and “lowest” sephirot represent the “animal soul” and the physical brain respectively.

Regardie then proceeds to describe in detail various esoteric techniques for psychospiritual development, including the meditation upon the “Qabalistic Cross” and the “Middle Pillar Exercise”.

The most basic practice involves cultivation of imaginary images with the goal of lowering the “threshold” of the conscious mind and allowing the “ascent of the archetypes” through which the powers of the unconscious can flow. This is similar to Jung’s practice of “active imagination.”

The goal, according to Regardie, is not only to “awaken” these unconscious powers, but also to “equilibriate” or balance them, similar to Jung’s concept of “integration”. Specifically, in this regard, Regardie’s notion of “the conscious reconciliation of opposing forces” draws on Jung’s commentary on the Chinese Secret of the Golden Flower.

Regardie’s Middle Pillar Exercise is a fundamental meditation practice employed by many contemporary Pagans. Starhawk (who is discussed below) included a simplified version of the practice called the “Tree of Life” exercise, in her book The Spiral Dance. Many Pagans today who know the practice simply as “grounding and centering”.

Regardie went on to publish The Philosopher’s Stone in 1938, subtitled “a modern comparative approach to alchemy from the psychological and magical points of view”, which discussed alchemy from a Jungian perspective.

Read more]]>brandonmademedoit@gmail.com (B. T. Newberg)Paths BlogsFri, 07 Dec 2012 22:20:19 -0800Jung's Pagans, pt. 2: Doreen Valiente, Starhawk, and Margot Adlerhttp://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/jung-s-pagans-doreen-valiente-starhawk-and-margot-adler.html
http://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/jung-s-pagans-doreen-valiente-starhawk-and-margot-adler.htmlCarl Jung articulated a psychology in which myth emerges from biology, part of a natural process of individuation. This 3-part guest post series by John Halstead explores the influence of Jung on major figures in Contemporary Paganism.

by John Halstead

Doreen Valiente

Doreen Valiente was the yin to Gerald Gardner’s yang, and her influence on the development of Paganism arguably extended beyond Gardner’s. As suggested above, but for Valiente’s influence, it is possible that Gardnerian witchcraft would have remained an insignificant branch of the British esoteric community.

Valiente is responsible for the introduction of a greater role for the Goddess and the mortal priestess in Gardnerian Neo-Pagan witchcraft. She revised Gardner’s “Book of Shadows” and is the author of the “Charge of the Goddess”, which is perhaps the single best known Neo-Pagan sacred text.

Valiente acknowledged the influence of Dion Fortune on her, describing her as “an occult writer who realized the true significance of the ancient gods, and their archetypal rule in the unconscious”. Unfortunately, it was almost a decade after her initiation by Gardner that Valiente published her first book, Where Witchcraft Lives (1962), and it was not until the 1970s that she began to more directly influence the broader Pagan movement.

The influence of Jung

In her first work, the influence of Jung on Valiente is already apparent. She writes that in the “deeps of the mind” Jung had “rediscovered the ancient gods; only he calls them 'the archetypes of the collective unconscious.’”

This influence continues in her later publications. In Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978), Valiente wrote: “In the collective unconscious of our race, therefore, dwell timelessly the images of the gods. They are the personifications of the forces of nature, and all are modifications of the primordial pair, the All-Father and All-Mother."

Valiente goes on to mention Jung in all of her other major publications, including An ABC of Witchcraft (1973) and Natural Magic (1975).

Valiente's influence on others

It is possible that Valiente’s greatest influence on the development of contemporary Paganism was not through her writings, though but through her influence on other prominent Pagans, like the Farrars (who will be discussed later).

Both Valiente and the Farrars had split from abusive male leaders of traditional Neo-Pagan witchcraft, Gerald Garner and Robert Cochrane in the case of Valiente, and Alex Sanders in the case of the Farrars. In Valiente, the Farrars found a mentor and a true priestess.

Starhawk

The most important influence Jung had on the contemporary Pagan movement was probably through Starhawk and Margot Adler, both of whom published their most important works in 1979. Starhawk’s book, The Spiral Dance, is the most widely read introduction to Paganism and has sold over 300,000 copies. Starhawk was initiated in multiple Pagan traditions, which was not uncommon in the West Coat Pagan community of the 1970s.

Starhawk’s work draws from numerous influences and she is very bad about citing her sources, but the influence of Jung in her writing is readily apparent.

The nature of the self

For present purposes, perhaps the most important influence on Starhawk was Victor Anderson, the founder of the Feri tradition. Anderson’s Feri tradition drew on Huna, the thought of Hawaiian thinker Max Freedom Long. Both Huna and Feri taught that human beings have three levels of consciousness, which Starhawk calls the conscious “Talking Self”, the atavistic “Younger Self”, and the divine “Deep Self”.

The Younger Self corresponds to Jung’s conception of the unconscious and the Deep Self corresponds to Jung’s conception of the “Self” (the numinous wholeness of the psyche). In The Spiral Dance (1979, 1989, 1999), Starhawk writes that the purpose of Witchcraft was to get these “selves” communicating, and this is accomplished through ritual.

According to Starhawk, the only way to reach the Deep Self is through the Younger Self:

“It is not the conscious mind, with its abstract concepts, that ever actually communicates with the Divine; it is the unconscious mind, the Younger Self, that responds only to images, pictures, sensations, tangibles. To communicate with the Deep Self, the Goddess/God Within, we resort to symbols, to art, poetry, music, myth, and the actions of ritual that translate abstract concepts into the language of the unconscious.”

The nature of magic

Starhawk describes divinatory practices as a kind of “spiritual and psychological counseling” and magic primarily in terms of its psychological effects. Inverting the way the relationship is typically described, she writes: “Psychology is simply a branch of magic.” She describes magic in terms that many naturalistic Pagan would find acceptable today:

“Spells are extremely sophisticated psychological tools that have subtle but important effects on a person’s inner growth. ... Practical results may be far less important than psychological insights that arise during magical working. ... Spells go one step further than most forms of psychotherapy. They allow us not only to listen to an interpret the unconscious but also to speak to it, in the language it understands. Symbols, images, and objects used in spells communicate directly with the Younger Self, who is the seat of our emotions and who is barely touched by the intellect. We often understand our feelings and behavior, but find ourselves unable to change them. Through spells, we can attain the most important power--the power to change ourselves.”

Margot Adler

Margot Adler is the granddaughter of Alfred Adler, who together with Jung and Freud, founded the psychoanalytical movement.

Margot Adler draws on Jungian theory to defend Neo-Paganism in her journalistic account of movement, Drawing Down the Moon (1979, 1986, 1996, 2006). Adler herself became converted to Paganism in the process of researching the book. The book, while ostensibly descriptive, also came to have an important prescriptive effect on the development of contemporary Paganism.

Polytheism and archetypes

While Starhawk failed to cite her sources, Adler was quite explicit about her debt to Jung:

“Much of the theoretical basis for a modern defense of polytheism comes from Jungian psychologists, who have long argued that the gods and goddesses of myth, legend and fairy tale represent archetypes, real potencies and potentialities deep within the psyche, which, when allowed to flower permit us to be more fully human. These archetypes must be approached and ultimately reckoned with if we are to experience the riches we have repressed. Most Jungians argue that the task is to unite these potentialities into a symphonic whole.”

She goes on:

“The Jungian conception that images of divinity and the sacred are representative of archetypes within the collective unconscious has given the neo-Pagan movement a conceptual framework within which it has been possible to accommodate polytheistic religious belief.”

Integration and disintegration

The influence of Jung is reflected not only in Adler’s commentary, but also in the quotes she selects from Neo-Pagans themselves. For example, Adler notes the influence of Jung on Feraferia founder, Fred Adams. Adler quotes from an essay of Adams, entitled “The Kore” in which he describes “polytheistic wholeness” which consists of four “archetypal beings”:

“The Mother is Source and Center. The Son is creative separation, opening and outgoing. The Father is full outwardness, withdrawal and particularization. The Daughter of Holy Maiden is Creative Return ...”

This cycle of archetypes closely resembles Jung’s description of the dialectical process of integration and disintegration of the ego in the maternal abyss of the unconscious.

Read more]]>brandonmademedoit@gmail.com (B. T. Newberg)Paths BlogsSat, 08 Dec 2012 21:45:17 -0800The Politics of Contempthttp://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-culture-blogs/the-politics-of-contempt.html
http://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-culture-blogs/the-politics-of-contempt.html@BenjySarlin is right: Although today Mitt Romney told a crowd in Las Vegas that, "I'm convinced that the path [Obama's] put us on is the path to Europe. Or, I jokingly say...to California," it's difficult to imagine Obama telling a crowd, even jokingly, that, "I'm convinced that the path Romney would put us on is the path to Mississippi." And if he did, the outrage would be unending.

Old Dr. Jung was onto something when he wrote about shadows and projection. For decades, the political Right has loudly insisted that the political Left holds "regular Americans" in contempt. (They've been admirably vague about precisely who is a "real" American; allows everyone to image that they must be insulting someone else.) Spiro Agnew announced that Americans who opposed the war in Viet Nam were an "an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." The Moral Majority whipped up lower-income, white Christians by implying that an "immoral minority" of snobby liberals looked down on the "moral majority" as it eroded "American values." George W. Bush, a child of generations of financial and educational privilege, ran as a brush-clearing Texas rancher with whom you'd love to have a beer, against John Kerry as a rich, "French," jet-skiing (apparently, only rich liberals jet ski) liberal. (We'll just ignore the fact that Bush bought that ranch just before beginning his political campaign, cleared brush only in front of the media, and sold the ranch immediately upon leaving the White House.) Despite decades of economic policies that hurt working-class Americans, the Right has been able to paint the Left as made up of arugula-eating, latte-drinking, snobs.

In the current campaign season, the Right has oddly let slip the pleasant veneer of regular-guy-respect for the middle class. The slippage has been evident for some time (see, e.g., Anne Romeny's discussion of "You People"), but it went mainstream overnight when Mother Jones released a tape of Mitt Romney talking at a private fundraiser to "his base<" -- people who could afford to attend a $50,000 a plate fundraiser at the home of a hedge fund manager with a taste for sex parties. (Hey, I belong to a religion that believes that all acts of love and pleasure are rituals of the Goddess, but I do wonder how this is supposed to go over with those middle-class "value voters," the old "moral majority" people who hate sex unless it's being enjoyed by Sarah Palin's abstinence-supporting, unmarried daughter or a hedge fund manager who raises money for a Mormon millionaire.)

What does all of this have to do with Pagans? The vast majority of American Pagans are lower- to middle-class people. Many Pagans choose to do work that they love, even if it doesn't make them wealthy. Others scrape by on Tarot readings, healing services, selling herbal concoctions. The sight of a respected Pagan elder having to beg money on the internet to cover medical expenses has become far too common. And, of course, there's the almost absolute intolerance of the Right for minority religions.

Early voting opened today in many states and election day is a mere forty-some days away. It's time to stop voting for people who hold us in contempt. Conservative Pagans who can't find it in their heart to vote for Barack Obama (as a Progressive, I share their reluctance, although from another direction) should be aware that they have other options. Gary Johnson is running as a Libertarian. Virginians can vote for Virgil Goode, running as the Constitution Party candidate. I think their policies will hurt middle-class Pagans, as well, but at least they don't claim that those Pagans "don't care about their own lives," as Romney did.